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I’m sure this will either strike some nerves, or elicit some strong agreement. Either way, I don’t think anyone will feel neutral about this post. But I think it’s an interesting and important topic to discuss: why do some people not only get divorced, but also then go onto marry and divorce multiple times? There’s clearly some ability to commit there, because the marriage occurs in the first place. But then, you’d think one divorce alone might put someone off to the idea of marriage. Some people make it onto marriage number two, but that’s it. Marriage number one was just a mistake—rushed into, or entered into too young—and by marriage number two, they learned what they needed to learn about themselves and relationships. You see that often: that marriage number two is the one that sticks.
So what of individuals who then go onto get a second divorce…and remarry, for a third time? Or a third divorce, and move onto spouse number four? It’s sort of shocking when someone who has been through that experience would even be hopeful enough to tie the knot yet again.
Even though I know every relationship and every person is different, and we never truly know what’s going on in a relationship unless we’re in it, maybe—just maybe—we can agree that when we get into three- and four-time divorced individuals, there might be some commonalities we can find in their personalities. Just maybe. If you show me two divorced couples, I’m happy to believe their reasons from splitting are entirely unique and different. But if you show me two people who have been divorced multiple times, I can’t help but wonder if they share some traits. I actually don’t need to just wonder because between my coworkers, friends, and family members, I personally know a sad amount of individuals who have been divorced a handful of times. And there are some stark and noticeable similarities between them all.
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Difficulty compromising
You have to be able to compromise if you’re going to make a marriage work, or if you’re going to have a marriage in which one individual isn’t a totally miserable doormat. If you’re going to share a life with someone who has a different personality, different needs, and different wants, there will be many times when you want different things and compromise must occur. But some people are incapable of it.
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A need for instant gratification
The instant gratification seekers are often members of the multiple-divorce club. Those are the ones who don’t want to work at things. They get it in their head that they’d like to run a successful jewelry line/become a singer/be a spouse, but quit the second that first store doesn’t accept their necklace line/that open mic doesn’t go well/that first marriage obstacle occurs. Marriage rarely works out for the instant gratification seekers.
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Conflict aversion
You can’t be conflict averse if you’re going to be in a life-long relationship with another person. Conflict will come up. So many divorced friends tell me about fights with their partners who would just bounce during an argument. They’d become infuriated if asked to talk about their feelings. They didn’t want to resolve things. They just wanted problems to go away—which they never did.
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Or conflict seeking
Then there are those who seek conflict. I have friends who are always in these tumultuous relationships, cancelling our plans at the last minute every time due to a fight with their partner (toxic relationships tend to make for bad friends like that). Unfortunately, what I’ve found in them is that they lack the self-love to appreciate a peaceful relationship. They have issues, and only feel “loved” if their partner is fighting with them. But everyone burns out on this, and it can lead to divorce.
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Hungry for attention
Two ex-bosses of mine, who are divorced multiple times, are just extremely hungry for attention. They both chose professions in the public eye, fixating on who was watching them, who was approving of them or disapproving of them, and who—quite frankly—thought they were hot or desirable. So the moment a spouse (I saw them each through two spouses) got too busy, for even a second, to shower these women with attention, they’d start looking for it elsewhere. Translation: they’d have affairs.
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Personality assumption
Relationship chameleons. You’ll find these a lot in the divorced club. These are individuals who never really developed an identity of their own, but rather look to their spouse for an identity. Whatever their spouse is into—hobbies, types of friends, fashion, politics views, religion—that’s what they’re into. Unfortunately, even relationship chameleons grow tired of the act and start to resent their partner (who never really even asked them to do this).
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Territorial
Being possessive and territorial rarely makes for a happy marriage. My dad is in one such relationship, and I already see him looking at other women. His current partner wants all of his attention and time. She accuses him of being a bad partner for just wanting to have dinner with some male friends, and not bringing her along for one night. You have to let your partner have his own individual life or he’ll feel smothered and leave.
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Or offensively dismissive
I have two male friends who lost their wives because they were too aloof, and now they deeply regret it. In the beginning of the relationship, they tried hard. They made their partners feel loved and desired. But then they just sort of…checked out. They stopped doing the things that really made their partners feel, “My husband is crazy about me and couldn’t imagine life without me.” I sense that, by the end, their wives felt, “It seems my husband wouldn’t even notice if I disappeared one day.” And so, they did just that.
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A bit too independent
Like I mentioned before, a sense of independence is important. But there are just those pseudo-selfish lone wolves out there who don’t understand that being in a marriage means melding lives to at least some extent. You can’t have your life and then, separately, your marriage, not making any adjustments or changes to accommodate the marriage. But some multi-divorced individuals live like that.
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Or entirely codependent
Some people who’ve been divorced multiple times fall on the other side of the spectrum: codependency. If you have one person who is codependent in a marriage, you can almost bet you have two. It’s very rare that a person who isn’t codependent is attracted to someone who is. So if you have two people entering into a marriage with codependency issues that means you have two people with some unresolved emotional issues. And those tend to come out eventually. If one person gets better, she grows apart from her partner.
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Impatient
You need tremendous patience to survive some of the struggles of marriage. This is just one of so many examples of something that may come up. There may be a time when your partner is absolutely slammed with a rare but time-consuming project and cannot give you attention for four months. Patient individuals understand that, with the foundation, of, say, multiple happy years together, they can wait. It will suck. It will be rocky. But they have to wait. Others don’t wait.
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Self-involved
My dad falls under this category again. He did it with his first two wives (I’m counting my mom as one of them) and is doing it again now. He sees his spouses as accessories to his life. He doesn’t really ask them about their lives. He doesn’t really care what they’re up to outside of the marriage. He just needs them to be on his arm, comforting and accompanying him through his endeavors, but isn’t interested in what they do outside the marriage. It’s a form of narcissism.
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Perfectionist
Perfectionists aren’t just individuals who straighten uneven paintings and micro-mange their employees all day. Perfectionists are also individuals who cannot forgive their spouses when their spouses prove to be—you guessed it—imperfect. They witness an unattractive moment in their partner—maybe career doubt or insecurity—and deem the partner no good anymore.
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Workaholic
You saw this one coming. Workaholics lose marriages all of the time. It can be frustrating for them, because part of the reason they work so hard is to provide a certain lifestyle for their spouses and family. But ultimately they don’t know when to slow down. They don’t know when to put the marriage first, so they never put the marriage first.
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Trust issues
No marriage can last long without trust. Some people think that if they just love their partner hard enough, that that distrusting partner will learn to trust. That’s not how that works. Someone with trust issues will see things that aren’t even there. They’ll become delusional, looking for infidelity that is not even occurring. Their minds lie to them. That’s an issue that needs to be worked out before a marriage.
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